Religion

June 16, 2014

Many thanks to David Lehman and Stacey Harwood for inviting me back as a guest-blogger this week.

I recall reading somewhere – maybe someone can help me with this – that ancient druidic rites, or perhaps they were Welsh bardic initiation rituals, included the following. You had to lie in a trough of water on a cold night, wholly submerged and breathing only through a straw, and compose in your head a long poem in a complicated meter. The next morning, you had to emerge from the water and recite your poem.

How many could graduate from that school?

I earned my MFA in the early 1990s from a reputable institution. I am, therefore, a Master of Fine Arts. Anyone who has earned the degree should take careful note of this particular passage from The White Goddess, by Robert Graves. In my tattered edition, the passage appears on page 457:

“Who can make any claim to be a chief poet and wear the embroidered mantle of office, which the ancients called the tugen? Who can even claim to be an ollave? The ollave in ancient Ireland had to be master of one hundred and fifty Oghams, or verbal ciphers, which allowed him to converse with his fellow-poets over the heads of the unlearned bystanders; to be able to repeat at a moment’s notice any one of three hundred and fifty long traditional histories and romances, together with the incidental poems they contained, with appropriate harp accompaniment; to have memorized an immense number of other poems of different sorts; to be learned in philosophy; to be a doctor of civil law; to understand the history of modern, middle and ancient Irish with the derivations and changes of meaning of every word; to be skilled in music, augury, divination, medicine, mathematics, geography, universal history, astronomy, rhetoric and foreign languages; and to be able to extemporize poetry in fifty or more complicated meters. That anyone at all should have been able to qualify as an ollave is surprising…”

Best of all is that “appropriate harp accompaniment”! He made no mention of poetry workshops or lying in troughs of water all night.

May 24, 2014

The next fearless poet to be featured is Eugenia Leigh! Here’s another honey badger who will be riding the wave of this summer’s Honey Badgers Don’t Give a B**k Tour. I am endlessly excited to showcase Eugenia’s work and go on an epic book adventure with her. Not only is her work full of the kind of vitality, toughness, heartbreak, and faith that begets the most devastating poetry, Eugenia is an amazing spirit and fantastic reader.

Eugenia Leigh is the author of Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows (Four Way Books, 2014). The recipient of fellowships and awards from Poets & Writers Magazine, Kundiman, Rattle, and the Asian American Literary Review, Eugenia serves as the Poetry Editor of Kartika Review. She received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is currently a doctoral candidate in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

In the following poem “We Called it the Year of Birthing”, Leigh begins with a story of making, of genesis: “God handed me a trash bag bloated with feathers. Turn this/into a bird, he said…And make with this,/ a new father.” From the beginning, we understand that what God is asking of the speaker is painfully inconceivable. It is up to the speaker to rise up to the request—to turn brave, to pick up shards, her own traumas being “sordid with similar beaten people”. To turn these fragments, these wrecked objects—feathers and bolts and nails—into something whole and human, requires a kind of alchemy.

But magically, forcefully, the next stanza turns, creating its own poetic alchemy: “Others of us—/the stubborn, unbreakable humans—weld our wounds/to form tools. Then we spend our days/mending bent humans or wiping the humans/mired by all the wrong fingerprints.” This poem is not a poem about merely facing the past. This poem is not a poem about merely pain. This poem is about the courage it takes to collect the darkest scrap, the vestiges from one’s history, the raw spaces, and heal them by re-making, re-building, re-birthing—the speaker and the speakers are agents of creation rather than decimation, reclamation rather than repudiation. At the end of the poem, we are rewarded with a moment of absolute wonder: “The morning the first baby was born in our circle of friends,/ we hovered over this child who, unlike us,/ was born whole.” The thrill and triumph of this line is not without its acknowledgment that the baby born into this new family is “unlike us”. This poem moves from the impossible to the miraculous in four short stanzas. Be on the lookout for Eugenia Leigh’s forthcoming collection from Four Way Books, Blood, Sparrows, and Sparrows!

We Called It the Year of Birthing

God handed me a trash bag bloated with feathers. Turn this

into a bird, he said. He threw me a bowl of nails. And make with this,

a new father. God gave some people

whole birds. Readymade fathers with no loose bolts.

The rest of us received crude nests. Used mothers.

I banged the nails into two planks of wood

and marched around a church screaming, Father, father

until friends appeared, hammering

the scraps they were given to make something of themselves.

When beaten hard enough, some people scamper into corners

sordid with similar beaten people. Others of us—

the stubborn, unbreakable humans—weld our wounds

to form tools. Then we spend our days

mending bent humans or wiping the humans

mired by all the wrong fingerprints.

The morning the first baby was born in our circle of friends,

we hovered over this child who, unlike us,

was born whole. You were given a good mother, we said. A good father.

Each one of us prayed. We scrubbed our soiled hands

before we held his swaddled body.

first appeared in PANK

Interview

In the words of Angry Asian Man, who are you? What are you all about?

I am a poet and question asker who believes in miracles and believes in you. I am the friend you call when the world is skeptical of your latest, looniest dream. My favorite kind of human is the kind who was almost crushed, but came out the other side with a laugh and a giant middle finger toward the hell that almost claimed her.

Tell me about your current or most recent project. How did you transform it from its genesis to its current form?

Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows, my first collection of poetry, will be published by Four Way Books this October. It is not the book I intended to write, but it’s the one that needed to be written.

I credit my “guardian angel poet” Laure-Anne Bosselaar for honing in on the first poem I wrote about my father and encouraging me to explore that narrative. As a close-minded young poet resistant to becoming “another poet writing about her fractured family,” however, I stayed in the mud of bad poems hiding in extravagant metaphors for many months before resigning to the idea that Laure-Anne might be right. The story I needed to tell might be my personal history after all.

It wasn’t until Marie Howe then gave the assignment to write a poem about “where I come from” in a litany devoid of metaphors or my other literary crutches that I started to tell the truth as brazenly as I could manage. I wrote those first poems six years ago, and I don’t know whether I could write them now. I hope to honor that younger poet by presenting this book to the world with fervent intention and without any apologies.

Tell me what you get excited about, in terms of your poetry and your work. What have you discovered in the process of shaping and forming your manuscript(s)? What has shaped, challenged, or invigorated your poetic practice?

I love the secrets poets embed into their line breaks and wonky forms. I believe every tiny revision a poet makes will change the poem’s overall impact a hundredfold. This might be because I err on the side of finding meaning in everything—not only in poetry, but also in life—and I love poetry because every word and break and white space is infused with meaning. My favorite part of the practice is discovering what the physical shape of a poem or the sound of a poem might be trying to say, and then laboring to bring out that hidden layer as much as possible.

Who are your influences? If you could map a poetic lineage, how would it look? Or the opposite: whose work do you admire and come back to, but contrasts from your own work?

The Bible was my first exposure to poetry—not only the Psalms, but also much of the prophetic books, which are also part of the Jewish Tanakh. Religious scriptural texts truly are the original experimental, cross-genre masterpieces. The book of Genesis, for example, tells two creation stories, and in the first of the two, the narrative is written entirely in prose until God creates humans. Then suddenly, injected into that first prose chapter, we see three surprising lines of poetry to describe the way God creates humans, as if to say that’s how well crafted we are.

How anyone could mistake this piece of art for a scientific account baffles me. It sounds to me like this story was written to help us rewrite how we perceive ourselves and perceive the world around us. That’s both the magic and the danger of powerful writing: it can reshape our worldview.

The first contemporary poets I fell in love with were Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. I was 13 years old and drawn to their ruthless honesty and their pains because this was the age I first began to struggle with my own will to live. I do often wonder, however, how much of my personal worldview and my own style of writing at that young age were influenced by their words.

What is one thing that you desire to say as a poet, but haven’t said yet? What does the future hold for you, if you could hold it?

I am more comfortable writing about violence, death, pain, and rampant brokenness, but I am interested in what it looks like to write also about renewal and redemption in a way that isn’t saccharine and stays true to our struggles. How does a poem shake the humans and demand that we all have hope without being preachy? Or should we dare to do that at all?

For a long time, I believed an artist’s most important job is to report what we see and know with unflinching truthfulness. But what if an artist’s job is also to challenge what we see and know by imagining possibilities beyond our present realities? Maybe this is a conclusion the better and wiser poets have already come to, but I am only now coming to them myself. The learning process begins with writing terrible poems about positive things, which I’m attempting to do lately.

March 25, 2014

In Mojave, the words we use to describe our emotions are literally dragged through our hearts before we speak them—they begin with the prefix wa-, a shortened form of iiwa, our word for heart and chest. So we will never lightly ask, How are you? Instead, we ask very directly about your heart. We have one way to say that our hearts are good, and as you might imagine if you’ve ever read a history book or lived in this world, we have many ways to say our hearts are hurting.

The government came to us first in the form of the Cavalry, then the military fort (which is why we are called Fort Mojave), and finally the boarding school. The government didn’t simply “teach” us English in those boarding schools—they systematically and methodically took our Mojave language. They took all the words we had. They even took our names. Especially, they took our words for the ways we love—in silencing us, they silenced the ways we told each other about our hearts.

One result of this: generations of English-speaking natives have never heard I love you from their parents, which in their eyes, meant their parents didn’t love them. However, those parents never said, I love you, because it didn’t mean anything to them—it was an English word for English people. There is no equivalent to it in the Mojave language—the words we have to express our feelings, to show the things berserking in our chests for one another are much too strong to be contained by the English word love.

But after boarding schools and work programs sent them to the cities for work, our children stopped speaking Mojave—they were beaten if they were caught talking or singing in their language. Maybe when they came home their parents spoke to them all about their hearts, but if they did, the children didn’t understand anymore.

It is true, the Mojave language does not say, I love you—and it is equally true that the government was hoping we would quit expressing this toward one another, that we would never again give each other tenderness. While we don’t say, I love you, we say so much more. We have ways to say that our heart is blooming, bursting, exploding, flashing, words to say that we will hold a person and never let them go, that we will be stingy with them, that we will never share them, that they are our actual heart. And even these are mere translations, as close as I can get in English.

Despite Cavalries and boarding schools, our language is still beautiful and passionate—it carries in it the ways we love and touch each other. In Mojave, to say, Kiss me, is to say fall into my mouth. If I say, They are kissing, I am also saying, They have fallen into each other’s mouths.

The word for hummingbird is nyen nyen, and it doesn’t mean bird—it is a description of what a hummingbird does, moving into and out of and into the flower. This is also our word for sex. Mat ‘anyenm translated to English means the body as a hummingbird, or to make a hummingbird of the body. On a very basic level we have a word that means body sex hummingbird all at once.

I think of the many lame things people say when they want to have sex with someone--imagine how much more luck they would have if they came to you with that lightning look in their eyes and that glisten in their mouths and said just one word: hummingbird. And you would think: bloom, sweet, wings that rotate, heart beating at 1,260 beats per minute, flower, largest proportioned brain in the bird kingdom, syrup,iridescent, nectar, tongue shaped like a “w”—which means something close to yes.

Recently, an adult learner who is teaching her children the language in her home asked our Elders if they could teach her to tell her son that she loves him. They told her that we have no word for that. But, the learner insisted, I need to know because I never heard my parents say that to me, and I will not let my son grow up without hearing me tell him that I love him. The Elders asked her, What is it you really want to tell him? The learner was emotional at this point, her words had caught in her throat. Instead of speaking, she made a gesture with her arms of pulling someone closer to her, and then she closed her eyes and hugged her arms against her chest. Ohhh, one of the Elders exclaimed, Now, we have a word for that—wakavar.

Maybe there is no great lesson to be learned here, but when I sit down to write a poem, I carry all of this language with me onto the page--I try to figure out what I really mean, what the words really mean to me. I don’t ever want to say, love, if what I mean is wakavar, if what I mean is hummingbird, if what I mean is fall into my mouth.

January 10, 2014

Now in its second successful year, The Chicago School of Poetics (CSoP) is kicking off 2014 with truly unique online course offerings and amazing opportunities to work with leading international poets in an intimate and collaborative setting.

From the comfort of your home or a nearby café, you can participate in courses using our innovative and user-friendly program—choose face-to-face, real-time video or simply listen in. Join an international conversation—courses have included students from Morocco, Canada, and Australia, as well as from the United States. This is a friendly environment for anyone who is looking to refine their work and connect with others.

Also, check back at chicagoschoolofpoetics.com for registration information about our next master class with Pierre Joris on April 26.

The glowing space is ours. CSoP showed the way!—Eileen Myles

This is what a school truly should be – think of Black Mountain College – beyond all the boundaries & borders. —Ron Silliman

I am surprised at how much I have learned and how much my writing and editing process has evolved. —Angie T.

I felt lucky to receive such input from an established poet and the price was a bargain because I felt I gained a lot from the class. —Michael S.

Winter 2014 Course Offerings

Poetics Level I with Kristina Marie DarlingSaturdays, February 22 – March 29 Time: 10 a.m. – 12 p.m. CST Blending lecture, written exercises, and in-class feedback this course is designed to help you view your poetry with the cold eyes that are necessary to make instinctual edits based on the many tools at your disposal.

Pulse Poem Pulse with Barbara BargMondays, February 24 – March 31 Time: 7 p.m. – 9 p.m. CST Language is a poet’s instrument. This class focuses on developing dexterity and creativity with the rhythm, texture, and tonal qualities of language. Students will break language down to its melodic and percussive elements and explore rhythms and sounds from diverse, sometimes unusual sources.

Red-Headed Stepchild: The Unholy Spawn of Poetry and Story with Sharon MesmerTuesdays, February 25 – April 1 Time: 7 p.m. – 9 p.m. CST Students will examine some very early examples of what we now think of as “hybrid” writing, then blend the hallmarks of those early models (brevity, spontaneity, tightly-focused imagery) with contemporary ideas and techniques (collage, appropriation).

Shock the Monkey: Poetry and Mass Media with Larry SawyerSundays, February 23 – March 30 Time: 10 a.m. – 12 p.m. CST Marshall McLuhan’s statement that “Art is anything you can get away with” will be a stepping off point for an examination of how current or popular music, movies, and the cult of celebrity influences one’s world and therefore also one’s writing. Students will study the slings and arrows of the outrageous fortunes of present-day celebrities and use appropriation, investigative methods, parody, the conceptual, replacement methods, hybrid narrative, and ekphrasis to push the limits of their poetry.

Erasure Poetry with Kristina Marie Darling Thursdays, February 20 – March 27 Time: 7 p.m. – 9 p.m. CST This course will focus on erasure poetry, meaning poetry created by excising significant portions of a found text, which is then edited, shaped, and structured by the poet.

November 10, 2013

When I asked Peter Oresick if he'd like to drink with me, I suggested one of my favorite Pittsburgh bars, Big Jim's. Big Jim's isn't like the other establishments Drinks with Poets has featured this week; it isn't a re-done dive bar or a bar with artisan anything. It's, as I like to say, a bar-bar. A place where you can get a thin yellow beer and a shot of whiskey--a basket of fries. A place where the bartenders will change the channel to Law and Order as easily as the Steelers. Big Jim's is, as they say, "in the run." The run is a little section of lower Greenfield where many steel workers once lived, and amongst those families was one named Warhola.

When I asked Peter if he'd like to get a beer with me on Sunday, he said, "Of course. I'll be at church down the street. Why not show up early with your camera and I'll give you a tour?" The church, a conveniently short walk from the bar, is St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church. And this is the church that Andy Warhol himself attended all of his Pittsburgh life. Its roots are Carpatho-Rusyn, as were his, as are Peter's.

I have, for years, wanted to see this church, knowing the influence it is said to have had on Warhol and his work. Peter snuck out of the service to retrieve me from the street, and I sat quietly while the priest (who was going on a little long this day, Peter whispered) finished up. The heavy smell of incense--art everywhere. Crazy colorful panels of art. I could only imagine Warhol as a boy staring at this eccentric beauty, letting it soak in, taking it with him to New York City. And we all know what happened next.

We strolled down the street after church. A beautiful sunny fall day. At Big Jim's we wanted breakfast and beer. Over the murmur of TV sports, we pulled up chairs into the soft light at our table and talked Carpatho-Rusyn, Warhol, and poetry for an hour or so.

After church each Sunday, our clan
drifted to the opposite end of the block to my grandparents’ house for food and
beer. I grew up in a small Ukrainian immigrant colony in a factory town on the
banks of the Allegheny River. The priest gave us a sliver of wine-soaked bread
on a golden spoon; our grandmother climbed steps from her coal cellar to offer
chasers of beer.

Beer, back then, was a Pony Bottle of
green glass with white painted lettering. “Rolling Rock. From the glass
lined-tanks of Old Latrobe we tender this premium beer for your enjoyment, as a
tribute to your good taste. It comes from mountain springs to you. ’33.’” I
don’t remember what mystified me more: the painted white pony or the meaning of
33.

But my father always wanted “the prince
of pilsners.” “Have a Duke!” was the motto of the Duquesne Brewing
Company. Then, in 1963, the Pittsburgh Brewing Company changed us all with the
first pull-tab beer can. We loved Iron City from then on. And litterbugs were
born all over town.

Since my college days, I’ve grown even
fonder and more mature about beer. And extreme beverages. In central Turkey I
saw the ancestral home of King Midas and I met Professor Patrick McGovern, the
great archaeologist of ancient brewing. I’ve tasted his Midas Touch, and his
Chateau Jiahu from 7,000 BCE, and his Egyptian Ta Henket re-brewed from
residue in a pyramid chamber.

Beer appears in many of my own poems,
but here is an ancient poem--from a clay tablet written by a Sumerian poet
circa 1800 BCE--that is said to be the oldest. Na zdorovja!

Borne of the flowing
water,
Tenderly cared for by the
Ninhursag,
Borne of the flowing
water,
Tenderly cared for by the Ninhursag,

Having founded your town by the
sacred lake,
She finished its great walls for
you,
Ninkasi, having founded your
town by the sacred lake,
She finished it's walls for
you,

Your father is Enki, Lord
Nidimmud,
Your mother is Ninti, the queen
of the sacred lake.
Ninkasi, your father is Enki,
Lord Nidimmud,
Your mother is Ninti, the queen
of the sacred lake.

You are the one who handles the
dough [and] with a big shovel,
Mixing in a pit, the bappir with
sweet aromatics,
Ninkasi, you are the one who
handles the dough [and] with a big shovel,
Mixing in a pit, the bappir with
[date] - honey,

You are the one who bakes the
bappir in the big oven,
Puts in order the piles of
hulled grains,
Ninkasi, you are the one who
bakes the bappir in the big oven,
Puts in order the piles of
hulled grains,

You are the one who waters the
malt set on the ground,
The noble dogs keep away even
the potentates,
Ninkasi, you are the one who
waters the malt set on the ground,
The noble dogs keep away even
the potentates,

You are the one who soaks the
malt in a jar,
The waves rise, the waves
fall.
Ninkasi, you are the one who
soaks the malt in a jar,
The waves rise, the waves
fall.

You are the one who spreads the
cooked mash on large reed mats,
Coolness overcomes,
Ninkasi, you are the one who
spreads the cooked mash on large reed mats,
Coolness overcomes,

You are the one who holds with
both hands the great sweet wort,
Brewing [it] with honey [and]
wine
(You the sweet wort to the
vessel)
Ninkasi, (...)(You the sweet
wort to the vessel)

The filtering vat, which makes a
pleasant sound,
You place appropriately on a
large collector vat.
Ninkasi, the filtering vat,
which makes a pleasant sound,
You place appropriately on a
large collector vat.

When you pour out the filtered
beer of the collector vat,
It is [like] the onrush of
Tigris and Euphrates.
Ninkasi, you are the one who
pours out the filtered beer of the collector vat,
It is [like] the onrush of
Tigris and Euphrates.

October 04, 2013

In Jewish communities around the world this week we're reading the Torah portion named after Noah. (Here it is in English.) I can't really imagine that this is a comfortable Torah reading in Boulder and environs this year.

This one's given rise to some great poems. Take Noah's Wife by Linda Gregerson, which begins (immediately after the title):

is doing her usual for comic relief.

She doesn’t

see why she should get on the boat, etc.,

etc., while life as we know it hangs by a thread.

The poem is sharp, biting, exposing the dysfunction at the heart of this old family story. (Maybe it's God's dysfunction; maybe our own.)

Or The New Noah, by Adonis (translated by Shawkat M. Toorawa) -- "between Heaven and us is an opening, / A porthole for a supplication.." Or Chana Bloch's "The Flood." Or Rivka Miriam's "Noah" (translated by Linda Stern Zisquit.)

I've struggled with my own Noah poems. They haven't come easily. It's too simple to make of the Flood something trite and pat. I see the same impulse in some of the rhetoric around contemporary floods and disaster. (If you want good poetry about a modern-day flood, don't miss To Die Next To You, poems by Rodger Kamenetz accompanied by illustrations by Michael Hafftka.)

And then, tucked into the end of the Torah portion -- after the Flood -- there's an entirely different story, the wild parable of the Tower of Babel. Judy Klitsner makes a compelling case that the sin of the people building that tower was a kind of coercive groupthink. It's fascinating to notice that that story begins with the observation "And all the earth was of one language and of one set of words..." What would our world, what would our poetry, be like if we had only one language available to us?

What can we take from the juxtaposition of flood and tower? The lens of poetry is one of the hermeneutics I like best. Read the portion itself as though it were poetry. Look for repeated words and images, for surprising turns of phrase.

First we're nearly swept away by tehom, the deep (a feminine noun which evokes the name Tiamat, the Babylonians' goddes of salt water.) The waters tower "high, high above the earth." Then "Fifteen cubits higher the waters towered." Then "And the waters towered over the earth a hundred and fifty days." Then the people begin to build a city and a tower that reaches the sky, much to the Divine chagrin, and God resorts to scattering us over the earth and complicating our speech.

This week's Torah portion shows us an excess of yang and an excess of yin, one might say; a lack of balance. Floodwaters towering; then bricks towering. One midrash holds that the people of Babel became so fixated on building their tower that if a person fell to his death from the high scaffolding, no one cared, whereas if a brick were dropped from high up and shattered, everyone wept to see the great project set back one brick's-worth.

May we all find ourselves able, this week, to stay even-keeled. To resist the self-aggrandizement of towering over anyone or anything. To find the right balance of femininity and flow without washing anyone away. To seek to build edifices with our lives and our words which honor the dazzling diversity of human language and heart, instead of pushing anyone to conform.

Thanks for being with me this week, BAP readers. It's been a pleasure. To all who celebrate: Shabbat shalom!

September 30, 2013

Every year I'm surprised by how variable the change is. The other night, when it was still Sukkot, we had a pair of friends over, a couple we've known since college and their son. Our son, who is almost four, proudly explained that this -- gesturing to the little skeleton of a house, garlanded with tinsel -- was a sukkah and that his dad had built it and we had decorated it. Then he explained that the leaves on the trees around us are turning orange and yellow because it's fall. The two statements seemed of equal import, coming out of his mouth.

Our friends' son, who is almost five, all but rolled his eyes. (He is practically grown, as far as he is concerned; the revelations of the almost-four set are old hat for him.) But then he really looked around, and exclaimed, "your leaves really are turning yellow! Ours are still green." They live only ten minutes away by car. But to get from there to here, one goes up a long slow hill. We're on a ridge. It's enough to make autumn's colors pop here while they're still lurking beneath the visual spectrum at his house.

Every year at this season I think of John Jerome, may his memory be a blessing. I return to my little green commonplace book, the one I started during my first tour through grad school. Its opening pages are all Doty and Birkerts, Brodsky, Anne Lamott. And then there's this:

Yellow [creeps] up the maple stems outside my window. I look up at the forest on the hill and imagine I can hear, inside all those stems, a zillion little doors clanging shut. Shutters pulled in, shades rattling down. Tree to leaf: you're beautiful, but you're history. You're archives. You just got a promotion: your new job is mulch.

All I wrote down beside that quote was John Jerome's name. But it's got to be from Stone Work.

Of course, the man who wrote that line has moved on to his new job, too, whatever exactly that may be. Six years of rabbinic school, going on three years of my rabbinate, and I still don't pretend to have any certainty about that. Some years I re-read Stone Work in the spring. I love the way it begins
with the spring equinox, flakes of falling snow melting on the hot coats
of happy and well-exercised dogs. A hint of new life, at a time when the outside world still seems to be dead, or at least sleeping.

John and I corresponded for a few years, back when I was at Bennington. He had been grown up in Texas, as I had, and had moved to the hills of western Massachusetts, as I had, and had made a living and a life for himself as a writer, as I hoped to do. I wrote to him about how his description of childhood swimming in the lazy Guadalupe river had made me nostalgic. About my hopes of living a writerly life. I still have all of the letters he sent me, a sheaf of neatly-typed pages. Every so often I think about reading them again, but I can't bring myself to do it, yet.

Sukkot: the festival when we move out of our homes and into these peculiar temporary little houses. Halakha, Jewish law, stipulates that the roofs be made of organic material and that one be able to see the moon and stars through them. My friend and teacher Rabbi Arthur Waskow once mis-typed the sukkah's "leafy" roof as a "leaky" roof, and then decided to keep the wrong word as well as the right one.

Our bodies, our lives, our certainties are as fragile as these little temporary houses. And when our time is up, we come apart, leaving behind only memories, and maybe an idle strand of tinsel to be found months later when the snow recedes.

August 30, 2013

I was recently marveling over this poem by Dylan Thomas, “Who are you who is born in the next room...” (published in 1945) from a series of pattern poems called Vision and Prayer because of what it does or enacts so successfully, and in doing so, how it transcends its arbitrary form. I don’t have the entire series in front of me, so it may be that this particular shape has some relevance that isn’t obvious when it’s viewed out of context because apparently these shapes form a series. What seems most interesting to me is how this writing works so well to set a scene and create a poetic equation with an ending that comes as somewhat of a surprise in a visceral way with such depth of metaphor, while it almost completely resists its own rhyme scheme. It provides an almost perfect balance between meaning and form that still manages to raise interesting questions because of certain effects.

I’m drawn at the outset to the two somewhat cavernous caesuras. The first comes after “In the birth.” It seems appropriate that the poet creates this gap in the line after the word birth (where the reader nearly falls in), and the second occurs after the word “alone.” Both caesuras offer a perfect physical illustration of what is being described (the pregnant pause) because the reader is forced to involuntarily pause after these words, which not only gives them emphasis but reemphasizes in a very graphic way the visual provided a few lines earlier with “I can hear the womb opening.”

From the poem’s opening there is a double meaning established because of the dramatic tension inherent in the first three words. The intentional ambiguity almost has the reader questioning himself or this might also be Thomas asking the question of himself.

Dualities cascade throughout. In the idea that Jesus was God’s word made flesh. The two physically separated rooms exist showing the reader as separate from what goes on in the other room. Also, the mention of a “wall thin as a wren’s bone” seems to underscore a difference between what the speaker perceives as the natural and unnatural world.

It’s quite marvelous that “Wren bone” is an anagram of “new borne.” Other imagery underscores an idea that this event on some level is holy but, again, a duality within the structures finds the reader noticing a shift of perspective in the mirror image of the poem that begins as the lines reach a midpoint and then recede in the second half. The poem’s structure mimics what is described, i.e., the poem itself is turning or shifting. These lines could be read in multiple ways “In the birth/bloody room/unknown to the …” or “In the birth bloody/room unknown to the…”

The poem, although only 71 words, does start with a vision and end with a sort of prayer but is Thomas describing his own thoughts on his own life that started with a similar birth but resulted in the many physical, mental, and domestic problems which plagued him for years? Or is this a meditation on our relation to the natural world and the unnatural, as represented in the poem, is the overlay of religiosity that is placed upon us that begins at birth? Thomas paints a prime moment, birth, which serves as a hinge between these two “worlds” i.e., the natural world and the world of civilization (and all the socialization that civilization demands).

As the wall is a part of the civilized world, the infant is not, yet anyway, and the point is emphasized internally as the rhyme scheme pairs “wild” and “child” together as a final example of the mysterious duality that ripples throughout what might have been a poem that Thomas wrote in one sitting in a very short amount of time.

The visual pattern creates interesting parallels that otherwise might not have existed had the poem been left aligned. The final interesting afterthought is that the form provides the reader with an object to be stared at, which it gives it an element of spectacle. Because of its symmetry the object simultaneously resembles a box, a shape of some sort like a pyramid reflected in water, a crucifix, the human form with arms outspread, and finally and obviously a diamond. Sixteenth Century alchemist Agrippa also included this shape and its opposite, which would look like a jagged hourglass, in his “Of the Proportion, Measure, and Harmony of Man’s Body,” which included diagrams of geometric shapes aligned with the human form. These two shapes comprise the ebb and flow of the alternating patterns in the book.

By starting with such an unanswerable question, by including such vivid imagery (e.g., heart print), and ending with such a violent twist, the poem registers like a minor earthquake and we stare down into its dark abyss and wonder what it meant to the author, as well as what it might mean to everyone facing the riddle of human existence.

Nota bene: See if you can guess which other literary wild child may have served as partial inspiration for this particular song by The Doors.

June 10, 2013

The subtitle to the film Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer, a documentary airing on HBO tonight
(June 10, 9 p.m.), is accurate: Nadia Tolokonnikova, Masha Alyokhina, and Katya
Samutsevich, who were arrested on Feb. 21, 2012, after performing for 40
seconds on the alter of Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral, do indeed embody
many of the precepts of 1970s punk-rock culture. Although presenting themselves
as a band, they view their work as performance art as much musical performance.
A collective of unstated numbers of young women, Pussy Riot has found its most
effective communication tool to be planned “spontaneous” musical performances
that consist of rudimentary songs proclaiming their feminist,
anti-authoritarian stance.

In
the documentary, the members come off as tough-minded, resourceful, and wry:
“It’s not too hard,” one of them says of their punk-band strategy: “Write a
song and think of the place to perform.” Filmmakers Mike Lerner and Maxim
Pozdorovkin have footage of the group assembling at a protest site, divvying up
the musical duties (“You play the guitar”), and diving headlong into a song or
two before scramming.

Since
the sacrilegious sin-crime and immediate arrest that made the group famous
worldwide lasted a mere 40 seconds captured on what looks like a jittery
cellphone, the bulk of A Punk Prayer
is taken up by the show-trial of what I’d call the Pussy Riot Three. Placed
behind a glass cage, the three women are allowed to make occasional statements,
but their defense team comes off irritatingly smug and complacent – it’s as
though the lawyers defending Pussy Riot lacked Pussy Riot’s own awareness of
just how offended the combination of defying the Orthodox Church and Vladimir
Putin’s leadership would be to the court system.

The
trial exerts a sickening fascination. The film is warmed by the comments of
some of the defendants’ parents. Soon after Nadia tells us that her father is “wonderful…
so supportive,” he proves it. A thoughtful, baby-boomer generation man, he tells
of being told by his daughter of Pussy Riot’s church-invasion plan as they rode
the subway. He says he immediately tried to talk her out of it, but “after a
few stops” on the subway ride, he realized she was determined to go through
with her actions. His reaction? “I started helping out with the lyrics,” he
says.

Unmentioned in the
film is the debt Pussy Riot says it owes to the Russian poet Alexander
Vvedensky (1904-1941), himself a government-suppressed poet of organized
anarchy, and, like the Pussy Riot Three, a member of an art collective, OBERIU
(Association of Real Art). During her group’s trial, Nadia specifically cited
Vvedensky’s “principle of ‘poor rhyme’… He said, ‘Sometimes I think up two
rhymes, a good and a poor one, and I pick the poor one, because it is the one
that is right.”

A
Vvedensky poem collected in the superb, recently published An Invitation for Me to Think (NYRB Poets) includes lines that
could be a Pussy Riot lyric:

How cute!

Will they cut or bite off their heads

It makes me want to puke.

All those about to die get cold feet.

They have activity of stomach,

Before death it lives as hard as it can.

But why are you afraid to burn up, man?

Nadia and Masha are
serving two-year sentences in prison camps; Katya was released on appeal. One
key moment in A Punk Prayer occurs
during a break in the trial: When informed that Madonna had written the group’s
name on her back to display it at one of the concerts, and had donned a
balaclava onstage as a gesture of solidarity, the faces of Nadia, Masha, and
Katia are intent, avid. They seem not to be thinking, “Cool! A big star likes
us, maybe we’ll become famous, too, and be freed!” Instead, what their faces
communicate is: “Oh, good. Maybe she gets it. Maybe some of her fans will now
hear about us and get it. Our message still has a freedom on Madonna’s back,
and in covering Madonna’s face. She’s not as good as we are at communicating
this freedom, this audacity, but she’ll do until we get out.”

(After tonight’s premiere, Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer will be repeated on June 13, 16, 18, and
22.)

November 16, 2012

Morgan Lucas Schuldt passed away on January 30 due to complications from
cystic fibrosis. I wanted to sketch a portrait of Morgan for this
blog, wanted to write about not only his extraordinary life, but the love
supreme that his poetry embodied. His death, though, is still too close, and it will take me just a little more time.

I attended his memorial services in Tucson, where he lived
for much of the last decade of his life. Like William Carlos Williams and Allen
Ginsberg before him, Morgan was a thoroughly Jersey boy, but he found a home in
Tucson. He found Mark Horosky and Adam Chiles. He found Stephanie Balzer and
Barbara Cully. He found Boyer Rickel.

The climate change from Vermont to Arizona—I mean going from
unseasonable April warmth in New England to anomalous frosty weather in the
Southwest—the mourning at various memorials those few days—as well as the
bourbon that occasionally accompanies said grief—fused with passing a year earlier of Paul Violi—another friend and mentor—all this left me tattered.
I returned to work at The Bookstore physically twitchy, emotionally worse.

After catching up with Matt on what I’d missed—including a
poetry reading by Clampitt House fellowBruce Snider—I was presented with a
stiff manila envelope. Scrawled on the front was a signed note from the poet Barry
Sternlieb: “For / Michael Schiavo / a few from the zen master. / (one just a
proof, / the other a signed + / numbered edition— / primitive, but still /
packing a punch!)”

I slowly unsealed the envelope. After removing one of the cardboard flats, I gently untaped the fine paper therein to reveal broadsides
of Michael Gizzi’s “Extreme Elegy” and “Second Extreme Elegy” that Barry had
printed in the mid-’80s. At one point, after a few months of employment at The
Bookstore, Matt had informed me that I was only the second poet he’s ever hired.
The first was Michael Gizzi.

A Tonic, A Ton

Barry is a wonderful guy. We would talk whenever he’d stop by the store, and I
know we talked about Michael Gizzi, but I can’t remember as I ever told him
just how much I loved his work, how much it had, at one point, intimidated me, and then later enthused me with its familiarity. I’m sure I never told him that one of my favorite Gizzi
books is Continental Harmony. And I’m
positive I never told him that “Extreme Elegy” is one of my favorite poems not
just in that book, not just of Gizzi’s, but of all time.

What I wonder is if Barry will ever fully understand what he did for me
this past spring, even when he reads this. In that one moment, through that unassuming
act, those poetic powers that I felt closest to, that I felt were forsaking me through
the deaths of those whom I most loved and respected (M. Gizzi himself passed
away in 2010), all at once, those powers announced their presence.

I wept.

Not out of grief, no, but filled—and not of a sudden—with the consolation of the universe.

November 14, 2012

Constance Rourke wrote many books, including
biographies of John James Audubon, P.T. Barnum, and Davy Crockett. Most importantly, she
wrote American Humor: A Study of the
National Character. Greil Marcus penned the introduction to a 2004 NYRB
reissue of the book and Luc Sante posted a glowing tribute to Rourke on her
birthday last year. I found a used copy years ago at the Montague Book Mill and
reading it brought immediate recognition with every sentence. Rourke
traces the American character first through three different archetypes: the
Yankee peddler, the backwoodsman, and the minstrel. She goes on to sketch
how these various strains of humor, these ways of approaching life, manifested
themselves not only in everyday Americans but in the work of Emerson, Dickinson,
Whitman, Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, James, and other American writers.

Luke Hankins has written on this blog about devotional poems, and the anthology he edited, Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets, in which three of my poems appear, offers the reader a diverse selection. Starting with excerpts from Eliot’s Four Quartets, the anthology travels through the second half of the 20th century into the 21st, offering up hymns by poets like Brother Antonious, John Berryman, Denise Levertov, Yehuda Amichai, A.R. Ammons, Leonard Cohen, Louise Glück, Marie Howe, Carl Phillips, and Sufjan Stevens. Luke connects the devotional mode in the West to the Metaphysical Poets like Donne, Herbert, Marvell, Southwell, and Bradstreet but includes other traditions, such as Hebrew, Islamic, Buddhist, Zen, and American Transcendentalism. Rourke’s book acts as prelude for that last one. In a country where almost 90% of the citizens feel they have a direct connection to the divine, this devotion—simultaneously to the real in front of us as well as to our own imagination—is a testament of another kind, as we hold together a nation-state while following 300 million distinct personal religious impulses, whether to Yahweh, Christ, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. It’s in this realm that the devotional poem, for me at least, edges from the metaphysical to touch the ’pataphysical.

I wanted to use a passage from American Humor as an epigraph to my collection, Green Mountains, as so many of the
humors Rourke writes about seem to be roaming around these
poems. And the mode is certainly devotional, if anarchic, a carnival. Each time I thought I had settled on one, maybe two, I found another. I wanted to use the whole book as epigraph: the
ranges of the Green Mountains were
containing the echoes in a much grander vista than I first thought,
one that put them on the same plane of conversation and back-and-forth, rather
than one text supplementing the other.

But this makes it sound like publication of Green Mountains is imminent. ’Tis not. H_NGM_N
published Ranges I and Forklift Ranges II, but Ranges III still needs a home before I started sending out the
entire manuscript for rejection. ’Til then, enjoy some samples of would-be
epigraphs.

American Humor (1959)

The farther he receded from view the more completely
he changed into a sly thin ogre something greater than human size.

•

Peddlers may have been chockfull of metaphysics. Their
secret has been closely kept.

•

Scratch the soil in China or Tibet or North Africa,
and up would spring a Yankee, exercising his wits.

•

The Yankee was often called practical, but in the bits
of story and reminiscence quickly accumulating about him, his famed ingenuity
seemed less a practical gift than a knack for making changes.

•

The Yankee would often spend hours whittling; in his
hands unexpected and fanciful shapes would emerge from white hickory, which
added nothing to a practical existence.

•

Listless and simple, he might be drawn into a
conversation with a stranger, and would tell a ridiculous story without
apparent knowledge of its point. With not a change of tone, out would leap an
odd figure. “He walked away as slick as a snake out of a blackskin.” “There we
was amongst an ocean of folks and cutting up capers as high as a cat’s back.” A
gulf often yawned between the large facts and his scanted version of them; as
he marshaled the characters in a story he was an actor and a troupe.

•

But this reluctance was only another form of
masquerade. These bits of indirection were social; direct replies would end
many a colloquy: questions or evasions prolonged the talk and might open the
way for more.

•

He could even take the Revolution as a joke; most of
his songs about it streamed nonsense.

•

Though he talked increasingly his monologues still
never brimmed over into personal revelation.

Sam Slick, the Yankee Pedlar

A barrier seemed to lie between this legendary Yankee
and any effort to reach his inner character. The effect was so consistent, so
widespread, so variously repeated that the failure to see him closely must be
reckoned not a failure at all but a concerted interest in another direction. He
was consistently a mythical figure; he appeared in the forms of expression
taken by myth, in cycles of short tales, fables, and plays. Plain and pawky, he
was an ideal image, a self-image, one of those symbols which peoples
spontaneously adopt and by which in some measure they live. Overassertive yet
quiet, self-conscious, full of odd new biases, he talked—this mythical
creature: that was one secret of his power. A deep relish for talk had grown up
throughout the country, on solitary farms, in the starved emptiness of the
backwoods, on the wide wastes of the rivers. The response seemed an outcome of
isolation; yet the same thirst existed upon the denser populations of the East.
His slanting dialect, homely metaphor, the penetrating rhythms of his speech,
gave a fillip toward the upset of old and rigid balances; creating laughter, he
also created a fresh sense of unity. He ridiculed old values; the persistent
contrast with the British showed part of his intention; to some extent he
created new ones. He was a symbol of triumph, of adaptability, of irrepressible
life—of many qualities needed to induce confidence and self-possession among a
new and unamalgamated people. No character precisely like him had appeared
before in the realm of the imagination. In the plays he may have stemmed at
first from the Yorkshireman of early English plays; the framework of many a
situation in which he appeared may have been borrowed; but he had existed in
life outside all these; and his final character was newly minted. It was to
survive in many fanciful manifestations an as outline of the American
character; it has never been lost.

•

His slanting dialect, homely metaphor, the penetrating
rhythms of his speech, gave a fillip toward the upset of old and rigid
balances; creating laughter, he also created a fresh sense of unity.

•

He not only created a bestiary; with the single
digression to the floral he insisted that he was a beast—a new beast, and the
records prove that in this contention he was often right.

•

He was in fact a Mississippi river-god, one of those
minor deities whom men create in their own image and magnify to magnify
themselves.

•

Crockett’s philosophy was simple: he wanted to save
the land from the speculator.

Davy Crockett

Inflation appeared with an air of wonder, which became
mock wonder at times but maintained the poetic mode.

•

. . . he lied from the delight of invention and the
charm of fictitious narrative. . . . The truth was too small for him.

•

Sometimes the songs were adorned with corals and
dolphins and fireflies. Most of them kept the rolling choruses with a touch of
nonsense.

•

The young American Narcissus had looked at himself in
the narrow rocky pools of New England and by the waters of the Mississippi; he
also gazed long at a darker image.

American Humor (2004)

To sustain burlesque something more than grotesqueries
is needed. Satire enters into its attentions; once a territory is invaded by
burlesque, all its objects are likely to look puffed and stretched, pinched and
narrowed. But pure satire stands aloof, while burlesque wholly possesses its
subject and wears the look of friendship.

•

The action included many digressions of plot, and
minor travesties. Showers of puns and double entendres fell, underlined in the
text and no doubt sufficiently stressed as spoken, yet never appearing as
palpable hits, for they came in enormous abundance, tumbling one over another;
they effervesced and overflowed; they often chimed and were musical.

•

This lawless satire was engaged in a pursuit which had
occupied comedy in the native vein elsewhere. As if it were willful and human,
the comic spirit in America had maintained the purpose—or so it seemed—to
fulfill the biblical cry running through much of the revivalism of the time: to
“make all things new.” It was a leveling agent. The distant must go, the past
be forgotten, lofty notions deflated. Comedy was conspiring toward the removal
of all alien traditions, out of delight in pure destruction or as preparation
for new growth.

•

All their modes were outward, rhapsodic, declamatory,
full of song, verging upon the dance, adorned with symbolic costume, moving
toward that oratory which was half burlesque.

•

He always demanded an audience: yet in the end, though
he included the critic, though his self-consciousness grew noisy and acute, his
finest efforts seemed mainly for his peers.

•

Half magnification, half sudden strange reversal,
these tales were likely to culminate in moments of “sudden glory” that had a
touch of the supernatural.

•

The strangest, most comic experiences, quiddities,
oddities, tales, and bits of novel expression were treasured and matched one
against another.

•

Grotesquerie and irreverence and upset made their
center.

•

What he did in that walk, was from the irresistible
promptings of instinct, and a disinterested love of art.

October 20, 2012

A bar survives as a small business because people come in
and buy drinks. How does that happen? Well, it might be because people sense a
hip vibe, it might be because the beer is cheap, it might be because all the
Yankees fans in the neighborhood have decided to watch the tragic series
against the Tigers together on one particular flat-screen TV, it might be
because the bar gives out that terrific goat cheese thing at happy hour, it
might be because everybody knows your name. Any of these and more might make a
bar successful.

None of these have anything to do with tax policy. Or
regulation. Instead, they have to do with the existence of customers—i.e.,
people.

So if you’re talking about “creating jobs” or “helping the
middle class,” you ought to be thinking about people. Why did the rabbi and the
priest walk into a bar? They both had enough money in their pockets to splurge
on a cocktail or pitcher of beer or glass of Bordeaux or whatever it is clergy
order when they’re in a joke. And that money came from a job, in their case, a
job with an organization that pays no taxes.

The tattered idea that lowering tax rates for business will
increase hiring is absurd. The Archdiocese of Philadelphia pays $0 in tax, and
yet closed
St. Mary of the Assumption, along with some smaller parishes and many
schools, this past summer. That means not only an out-of-work pastor, but teachers,
secretaries, janitors, clerks and administrators all losing their jobs. The
Roman Catholic Church’s taxes couldn’t get any lower; what the enterprise
lacked was parishioners—i.e., customers—i.e., people.

And regulation? Well, The Catholic Church, along with
other religious institutions, is
exempt from many regulations, particularly the ones that promote equality
and fairness by forbidding discrimination. For example, in Iowa, a business is
not allowed to hire or fire someone “on
the basis of age, race, creed, color, sex, national origin, religion, or
disability,” unless it is "[a]ny bona fide religious institution or its
educational facility, association, corporation or society.”

But most regulation exists to keep people from harm, not
from injustice. Rules against serving toxic food or dumping slag in the
drinking water or selling cars that don’t have functional braking systems are
good for people—i.e., customers—and, indirectly, for businesses, because they
keep customers—i.e., people—alive. The reason bars have to get liquor licenses
is to protect those customers—i.e., people—from a substance that can be very
dangerous if not properly handled. A dead customer will not boost revenues. A
dead customer won’t enhance that hip vibe. A dead customer won’t bring his
friends in next April, when the Yankees’ chances look pretty good again.

O burdensome regulations! O burdensome taxes! In Mitt
Romney’s Bar & Grill, he’s pouring a secret jobs potion that’s going to
jump-start our economy without even a sideways glance at the actual human
beings behind economic transactions like ordering a Fuzzy Navel. The only
people in his post-Citizens United
wo
rldview are corporations, who will pay less tax and follow fewer rules. To
make up for that generous gift, he’ll slash “wasteful” government spending on
such whatchacallems as:

teachers

inspectors

auditors

analysts

secretaries

scientists

researchers

Prepare to get fired, bureaucratic slackers, at which point,
you’ll cease to be a customer—i.e., person. But don’t worry, that small
business called St. Mary’s, just down the block from your out-of-work ass is
sure to use its windfall tax break and freedom from regulation to hire more
priests
and nuns, folks who don’t need the contraception not covered in their
health insurance. Ask your parents to send you to Divinity School. You’ll clean
up in that libertarian dreamscape, that model of trickle-down economics, that
no-tax, low-regulation utopia where the secret jobs potion flows freely through
every empty pew.

March 13, 2012

The case against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. ObamaCare, is not nearly as fun as an Imperial Fizz, though it's definitely fizzy. All of the law's ingredients, the whiskey, rum, lemon juice and sweet, sweet sugar of insurance policy arcana--all except the sparkling water of a mandate--have already been mixed and are being shaken as we speak. They can’t be taken apart at this point without dumping the whole shebang down the drain, which is not to say that the Supreme Court won’t do exactly that. And the glacial pace of the Affordable Healthcare Act's implementation, like the slow-motion process of its enactment, gives opponents plenty of time to whip up a frenzy of anti-Imperialism, before this drink ever hits the coaster.

I, ______________, should not be forced to pay for health insurance. Fill in the blank with “taxpayer,” “small business,” “Utah” or “Catholic bishop,” and you’ve got the argument against ObamaCare. All of its critics base their opposition on that word forced, raising issues of liberty. Certainly, the recent contraceptive flap was initially introduced—by Republicans, not the media—and framed as a question of religious liberty. But if we’ve discovered anything from that debate, it’s that liberty is not the only value Americans hold dear. Liberty’s not the only value enshrined in the Constitution, either. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are the big three, and it wasn’t long before the national conversation morphed against Republicans’ will into one about a different set of values: whether women deserve to pursue the kind of happiness that comes from choosing when they have children, and to have the kind of life that comes from preventing pregnancy when it poses a health risk. Guess which two values trumped the third in a contest between the religious liberty of bishops (total of 195 in the U.S.) and the life and happiness of women (more than 150,000,000 in the U.S.)?

Not only are bishops a tiny group, they don’t use contraceptives and nothing in the health care law is making them do so. But when they act as employers, rather than as leaders of spiritual flocks, they have to follow the same rules as secular hospital or university administrators. As employers, they can’t dictate the health care decisions of their employees. They are not Imperial, though they do have nifty regalia.

Leaving the contraception coverage rule aside, I look at the broader debate over health insurance and find it odd that so much resistance to ObamaCare has come from the religious community, particularly fundamentalist Christians. Jesus had a lot to say about taking care of each other, from loving thy neighbor to all those blessings on the poor and vulnerable in the Beatitudes. He spent quite a bit of His time healing people and feeding them, and none of it lobbying. While He never ran for office, it’s easy to imagine Him favoring universal access to health care. On this specific topic, He said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor but the sick.”

Here’s what the emphasis in the New Testament is not on: taxes, small business, states’ rights or, frankly, political liberty. What little Jesus said about taxes, “render unto Caesar’s what is Caesar’s,” seems to argue in favor of paying them. He never mentioned small business, unless you count the enterprising moneychangers and dove-sellers in the temple, whom He whipped. Judging from that rare example of holy rage, His policy was not pro-business. The Chamber of Commerce would have despised Him. Jesus talked more about divorce than taxes. Where is the fundamentalist Christian groundswell to make divorce illegal? And how do the 1 in 3 divorced Evangelicals—Evangelicals defined as Christians who attend church weekly, take the Bible literally, and proselytize—reconcile their own failure to stay married with Jesus, their Lord and Savior?

But on caring for others, Jesus had a lot to say. He was inclusive, embracing tax payers, tax collectors, Samaritans, women, and other “others”—one might almost describe Him as a single payer plan. ObamaCare, emphasis on “care,” is inclusive, too. Embrace that moniker, Mr. President. It’s the Christian thing to do.

February 18, 2012

When I was a wee bairn in the seventies, a mass-market paperback called The Poetry of Rock was often to be found among the macramé and marijuana seeds. This anthology was a weird little bible to me, its concordances the records that were always lying around with their mystically resonant titles—Aja, Slider, Sticky Fingers, Dixie Chicken—and glorious gatefolds. I’d pore over lyric sheets the way Harold Bloom claims he immersed himself as a child in Blake and Hart Crane. My earliest act of literary exegesis was attempted when I was eight or so, as I listened again and again to a secondhand eight-track cassette of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, trying to understand what it could mean to know “how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.”

Paul Muldoon writes of Leonard Cohen, “his songs have meant far more to me / than most of the so-called ‘poems’ I’ve read.” The list of artists of whom I could say this seems long until I remember why “most” of the “poems” I read are “so-called.” Popular music—rock and roll at first, soon followed by pop, country, jazz, disco, R&B, the blues, soul, hip-hop, metal—has been for me less a passion or obsession than what Kenneth Burke said poetry was: equipment for living. I remember listening to “Tumbling Dice” as a teenager and wondering whether even the Stones themselves understood what perfection they had achieved. I didn’t get people who simply put music on in the background as they talked or read or ate. You had to, yes, immerse yourself in it, like a religious mystery. In college, before I quit drinking, I rarely got laid, in part (only in part) because the end of the night would inevitably find me pressed against a stereo or jukebox, trying to filter out the sounds of a party or bar so I could concentrate on the Ramones. It was ridiculous. I was ridiculous. Rock and roll is, among other things, our profoundest celebration of the ridiculous.

February 16, 2012

Most of the poets I know are atheists. Hell, most of the people I know are atheists. Given that only 1.6 percent of Americans self-identify as "atheists," I conclude that I live in a bubble, like most hypereducated aesthetes on the liberal-left end of the political spectrum (I realize that's redundant). To their credit, most of the atheists I know don't consider themselves to be super-special people who should get together and crow about how much smarter they are than all the dimwits who fall for old fairytales about their big daddy in the sky, which is what Daniel Dennett would have them do (consider the self-triumphalism of the ReasonFest conference).

I have nothing at all against either a philosophically-informed atheism or a casual atheism that arises from a simple lack of religious temperament. There is little that annoys me as much as that smug atheism whose adherents refer to themselves as "freethinkers" or "brights." I have met a lot of these people, and not one—not a single one—has ever had the slightest idea what he was talking about.

Perhaps my anecdotal experience is misleading. Perhaps there are scores of self-described freethinkers who know the history of the concept of reason, who have read Aquinas and Kierkegaard and Jonathan Edwards and Karl Barth, who can refute the countless historical errors and category mistakes of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins as handily as David Hart and Mark Johnston can. But if there are, they're keeping a low profile. And I'm confused about why they would associate themselves with an intellectually bankrupt movement (Johnston rightly calls them "undergraduate atheists"). Because there is an honorable atheism, a school of real thought to which atheists can lay claim. Hart puts the point this way:

The only really effective antidote to the dreariness of reading the New Atheists, it seems to me, is rereading Nietzsche. How much more immediate and troubling the force of his protest against Christianity seems when compared to theirs, even more than a century after his death. Perhaps his intellectual courage—his willingness to confront the implications of his renunciation of the Christian story of truth and the transcendent good without evasions or retreats—is rather a lot to ask of any other thinker, but it does rather make the atheist chic of today look fairly craven by comparison.

Nietzsche would laugh at the idea that the human animal could free itself from delusion by seeking an ontological foundation in the natural sciences. Because the idea is laughable.

February 12, 2012

I'm told Sunday's a "low numbers day," so I'll start posting in earnest tomorrow, but I thought I should come in here & noodle around a little. I'm a fairly lazy reader of contemporary poetry—if I'm not reviewing a new book of poems, my method is to pick the book up whenever I happen to remember its existence, read a poem or three, & put it back on the shelf. I'm usually reading four or five books at once, but unless that poem or three kill me, I'm content to let most contemporary poetry remain a dark continent I dream of colonizing one day. LOL metaphors!

The upshot of all this is that there are several piles of contemporary poetry books—I'm already tired of typing those words, instead of "contemporary poetry" I'm going to say "cantaloupe"—several piles of cantaloupe books lying around my apartment at any given time. Now I will go over to the nearest pile of cantaloupe & report back to you on its contents. Writing is so funny, how it works. OK, so that pile had Paul Muldoon's Maggot, D. A. Powell's Chronic, Mary Ruefle's Selected Poems, & A. R. Ammons's Sphere. I don't know what Sphere is doing in there, it came out in the seventies, & I've actually read it. The Muldoon came out in 2010 & the Powell was published in 2009, so you see what I'm dealing with here. Ruefle's book I've read most of, but that's because I was teaching it.

February 08, 2012

Cordials took a hit with the advent of infused liquors. They used to be our sturdy flavor friends, rarely useful, but rising to the taste when called upon. Now they’ve been downsized, as vodka got more productive, infusing itself with a frightening range of non-vodka tastes. Many of the flavors, raspberry or mint, to name just two, supplant a hard-working cordial like Chambord or crème de menthe in contemporary drink recipes. And cordials have another problem: their biggest purveyor in the US is probably DeKuyper, whose labels tell all: I WAS DESIGNED BEFORE POTTERY BARN EXISTED! Enough bartenders brew their own bitters these days—the culinary equivalent would be starting a fish stock not by putting a carcass into a pot of water but by tying your own flies and heading off to Idaho—that brightly colored corn syrup ain’t coming near their specials menus.

Cordials weren’t always so out of touch. I can’t help but think they are due for a comeback, like moderate Republicans. Indeed, a smattering of cordial missionaries are out there in their Bay area backyards, going to insane lengths to recreate crème de noyaux. Don’t try this at home, really, no matter how much Mr. Manhattan says you can. You have to crush the pits of apricots in order to get the kernels, then crush the kernels into a powder, then steep the powder in brandy for a month, then…we’re just getting started. Plus nobody seems to know the full recipe. There might be other kernels—cherry? peach?—to pulverize as well. And something to make it pink. Unless it wasn’t pink back when people knew how to make it. Who can say?

Lots of question marks here, but then lots of distinguished cordials—Chartreuse, Benedictine—have secret recipes and exotic histories involving religious oddballs. Which brings us to Mitt Romney, the endangered cordial of presidential candidates. Surely no one can dispute the oddball history: a great-grandfather, packed off to Mexico with his five wives to preserve polygamy. Oops, that’s three wives. Wife Number Two divorced that particular Romney and he hadn’t married his fifth one yet. He got around to her later, in 1897, seven years after the Mormon church “banned” polygamy. Apparently he was not alone in defying the LDS church ban. The man who issued it, Wilford Woodrow, added a wife or two to his own post-ban collection as well.

All of this was over a hundred years ago, and it’s fair to ask whether any of it matters. After all, Jimmy Carter’s oddball brother was alive and operating during his lifetime, and the less said about Newt’s three wives at this point, the better. Plenty of other presidential candidates have had recent messes, from W’s drinking problem and Ron Paul’s racism to Obama’s Jeremiah Wright problem. What matters from a voter’s perspective, though, is not how recent the event is but how the candidate handles its relevance. Romney’s an active member and elder in the Mormon church. He talks the faith talk incessantly. He’s even taken to accusing Obama of waging war on religion. Since he brought it up—indeed, making himself the defender of God—the details of his faith ought to be relevant. But rather than address them, Romney airbrushes them out. His message is that the Church of Latter Day Saints is just like any other Christian faith. No need to look under the hood, ma’am.

In 2007 he gave a “major” speech on his religion, hoping to put any further inspection to rest. The key passage is this:

"There are some who would have a presidential candidate describe and explain his church's distinctive doctrines. To do so would enable the very religious test the founders prohibited in the Constitution. No candidate should become the spokesman for his faith. For if he becomes president he will need the prayers of the people of all faiths.”

Nope, no need to look under the hood. The only doctrine he specifies is in the paragraph before: yes, Mitt Romney believes in Jesus Christ. Stop the presses. The rest of the speech is an argument for religious tolerance. Well, almost. Early on he slips in that “Radical violent Islam seeks to destroy us,” which doesn’t sound terribly tolerant to me. Surely the 1.57 billion Muslims around the world get more out of their religious life than hate. Also notice that, while he argues he shouldn't “become the spokesman for his faith,” Romney doesn’t hesitate to speak for what Islam is all about.

It’s illustrative to compare Obama’s speech after the Wright explosion. Remember? Yes, you probably do, unlike Romney’s speech, which you’ll have to look up like I did. Obama talked about the underlying issue, race, but he did so by laying out in vivid detail the unique aspects of his own situation as a biracial person. He described his white grandmother who loved him dearly but whose remarks about blacks sometimes made him “cringe.” (I am paraphrasing from memory. And Obama gave that speech four years ago.)

Obama addressed particulars, which is why his speech is memorable. By contrast, Romney delivers generalities. "There are some,” he says, repeatedly, followed by something you doubt anyone actually said. “I will put no doctrine of any church above the plain duties of the office and the sovereign authority of the law,” he says, using not the personal pronoun “my” to modify “church,” but the generic and categorical word “any.” The only time he names his Mormonism is when he assures us that he’s not about to renounce his faith, as “some” would prefer. By the end, Romney’s no longer an individual. He's the plural "we": “We should acknowledge the Creator as did the Founders – in ceremony and word. He should remain on our currency, in our pledge, in the teaching of our history, and during the holiday season, nativity scenes and menorahs should be welcome in our public places.” Ah, we’re to think. He’s just like you and me. (But not like those Muslims, goes the subtext. For all the talk of tolerance, this is a Christian “we,” with Jews as honorary members.)

In the Middle Ages, cordial meant “from the heart.” That usage is obsolete. Its primary function today is to appear, somewhat insincerely and always adverbially, in the valediction of business letters, or, even more insincerely and adjectivally, as the modifier of choice at press conferences by congressmen after partisan negotiations, to describe how the closed-door “discussions” went. Why, they were “cordial.” Airbrushed, anyone? By the way, cordials, those drinkable nouns, do have one known ingredient: sugar. They are always sweetened. Mitt Romney, who's cordial enough, comes across as hiding a secret recipe, somewhere under that airbrushed hair. The only thing we can say with certainty about the candidate is that he has been seriously sweetened. Maybe he’s not due for a comeback.

January 11, 2012

Bill Hayward brings to our attention a compelling sequence of blog posts about Genesis from the redoubtable Walter Kirn. Here's a link to the first in the series, which argues that "the Eden story in Genesis is about a drug bust and its aftermath. It begins by discussing the prohibition of a potent psychedelic substance: a plant or a fruit that grants those who ingest it personal access to divine capacities." Eden allegorized as a drug bust is an awesome idea that Kirn handles like a parable in the Kafka manner.

To Kirn's account I (who often think of Genesis in relation to The Odyssey as allegories of Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman cultures) would add the reminder that Odysseus's men are tempted by drugs in the Lotos Eaters episode and, one could argue, in that of the Sirens, though Circe, to whom many succumb, represents the sin of sex not of dope. Hard to improve on Joyce's vision of Circe as a brothel madame. But speaking of sex, what do you -- if you are Walter -- make of the fact that fucking is the first thing Adam and Eve do after enjoying the fruit? How are knowledge and carnal knowledge related?

If you're wondering why there's a picture of Soren Kierkegaard in this blog post, it's just to add his name to Kafka's as among the most imaginative of bible interpreters -- a wonderful tradition worth keeping alive. A toast to you, Walter Kirn. -- DL

“Martin Buber tells this tale: ‘Rabbi Mendel once boasted to his teacher Rabbi Elimelekh that evenings he saw the angel who rolls away the light before the darkness, and mornings the angel who rolls away the darkness before the light. ‘Yes,’ said Rabbi Elimelekh, ‘in my youth I saw that too. Later on you don’t see those things anymore.’” (Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

I first read these words a little over a decade ago, toward the end of a road trip I took just before my final year of college. Ostensibly on a mission to visit the archive of Thomas Merton, the writer and Trappist monk, two friends and I had taken the trip mostly because we could. Guessing, correctly, that the time when our freedoms would so distantly outpace our responsibilities was not long for the lasting, and helped by my college’s liberal attitude to undergraduate grantmaking, we dragged an egg-shaped fiberglass trailer out of our northern California hometown and didn’t return until two months were through.

Can I say we took advantage? We certainly tried. Besides Columbia's Rare Book and Manuscript Library on 114th Street in Manhattan, we had no definite destinations, there was nowhere we had to be. Our route traced a long and lopsided figure 8 on the map that carried us to Chicago to New York to Philadelphia to DC to New Orleans to Texas to Seattle to Humboldt County. Along the way we drank in the houses of friends and slept in the driveways of strangers. We crashed weddings in borrowed clothes. We wrung the last drops of our combined liquidity from an ATM in New Orleans and decided that Merton himself would probably spit down on us from heaven if we missed the midnight show at the Maple Leaf Bar. (A sprint in the small hours of the morning got us to San Antonio, where an acquaintance offered us pot and cash to mow his lawns and the mother of a friend graciously overpaid us to organize her files.)

"Lively and affectionate" Publisher's Weekly. Now in paperback.Click image to order your copy.

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